Why fashion marketers should be paying attention to Tumblr

By Ben Jacobson

Why fashion marketers should be paying attention to Tumblr

Tumblr is a bit of everything – a publishing platform, a content management system, a social network, a content discovery engine and a content curation platform all rolled into one. This is the promise of “microblogging,” a powerful way for bloggers to share short or long content easily in a format that lends itself particularly well to the sharing of images. It’s the highly visual and share-friendly nature of the site that makes it such a perfect venue for fashion brands to showcase their creations.

Tumblr is not as versatile as WordPress, for example, when it comes to the flexibility that a marketing team might need from their main website. But unlike the other marquee visual social hubs, including Pinterest and Instagram, Tumblr is highly customizable, allowing brands to push the limits of the platform so that their presences there become high-concept, highly designed, fully branded realms that just happen to be perfect for “reblogging.” If you’re in the business of selling a look, Tumblr is perfect.

Here’s what Valentine Uhovski, Tumblr’s official “fashion evangelist,” had to say about this:

“All the Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest pages all look the same way no matter how popular they are. No fashion Tumblr page ever looks the same and that’s what designers crave, that creative energy and individuality. Tumblr fashion is kind of like a canvas where dreams are born, where creative anonymity is standard, and where the accumulation of follower is not important. Everyone from Karl Lagerfeld to Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez come to Tumblr for inspiration because it’s a raw, advanced and a richly visual community.”

Calvin Klein’s Tumblr blog homepage

The latest fashion trend on Tumblr is for well-known fashion houses to use it as their primary web presences. In June, New York’s Costello Tagliapietra designers rebooted their website to be fully powered by Tumblr, souped up with an enhanced (and rebloggable) e-commerce engine using “shoppable post” technology by BlkDot.

If you’re a fashion marketer looking for exposure, Tumblr can be a great lead generator. For one thing, it is ready-built for search engine optimization. In fact, according to SimilarWeb PRO’s crawlers, a full 15% of Tumblr’s traffic comes from search. In the last month, Tumblr received 134 million search referrals, much more than e-commerce’s average of 47 million and the fashion industry’s average of 48 million.

Not only does Tumblr receive traffic from search, it feeds search rankings too. Links in Tumblr are “do follow,” which is exceptional for a microblogging/social platform, so links to your website on a Tumblr feed can do a lot for your SEO.

Tumblr’s tagging system makes it easy for users to discover new content. And some of the site’s most popular tags are related to fashion – #grunge, #hipster and #pastel, for example. Tumblr users actually look for and follow content via tags, so it’s easy for a blog to be discovered on the social network even if it doesn’t have many followers.

According to SimilarWeb PRO, four out of the top ten onsite Tumblr searches relate directly to the fashion industry.

Tumblr’s top ten internal search terms are extremely fashion-centric

Because of the nature of Tumblr feeds, users are forgiving when overloaded with of content and often less-polished content. So it’s a great place to test something before going live with it on Facebook. If you aren’t sure that a new design direction, image or meme will strike a chord with your audience, try it out on Tumblr first and see what the reaction is before posting it elsewhere. In this sense, Tumblr is the ultimate fashion sentiment listening tool.

The fashion industry relies on Tumblr for much of its social activity. SimilarWeb PRO lists Tumblr as the industry’s number seven referrer, driving 2.85% of all visits to fashion sites. It can be extremely useful for a fashion marketer looking to break into the game, since an active blog on Tumblr can increase exposure through sharing and search traffic. Images and videos of fashion sets, models wearing fashion creations and articles about fashion all do well on Tumblr. Well-established luxury brands can also benefit from Tumblr’s branding exposure opportunities and can even sell their products online.